Weightlifting

Last night Dave worked with Tom and me on the clean. It is hard to pull the weight bar straight up without letting it fly outward; you want it to move vertically only, even though this means it flies right up under your chin. You don’t want it to curve away from the body and then curl it in. And then at the top—you’ve powered it up so fast that it floats for an instant—you drop under it, raise your elbows, and catch the bar against your shoulders on top of open fingers. This part is scary. I don’t want to dwell on the nervousness and make my technique even worse, but powering the bar up under my chin and dropping under it makes me feel like I’m going to knock out my teeth or whack myself in the throat with the bar. Clean and jerk pictures. We only worked on the clean last night. I got as far as lifting 40 kg total—not very much, but it was challenging and exciting. I’m looking forward to getting better at it. Feeling enthusiastic, we then worked for a few minutes on the technique of the snatch lift, where you continue the clean by getting under the weight with outstretched arms. You end up in an overhead squat. This is way too advanced for us to do with a weighted bar, but it was fun to practice the moves with a PVC pipe. For gymnastics, we worked on parallette handstands and pass-throughs, cartwheels, parallel bar swings, hanging leg-raises on the rings, and pommel-horse push-ups. It was tons of fun as always.